Remember Anthony Weiner, also known as “Carlos Danger” — the former congressman who kept texting people pictures of well, umm, that part of his name? It all made quite the splash because he is married to Hillary Clinton’s consigliere and constant sidekick, Huma Abedin.

Turns out that Anthony was such a perp — and so enthralled with his own — that he was sexting with a minor. That is a federal offense carrying up to 10 years in prison. So, he got raided by the New York Police Department and the New York office of the FBI.

They seized his laptop computer. It would have been bad enough if it had only had contained all his porn. But it posed a huge problem for the FBI, DOJ and Mrs. Clinton.

Comey had already exonerated Hillary of her blatant Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice violations two months before — in time for her to wrap up the election they all expected and wanted her to win.

Peter Strzok and the Trump-hating key players in the Clinton email “investigation” were already well into crafting and leaking the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Only a few hours after the New York office of the FBI took possession of the Weiner laptop, on September 26, 2016, the FBI computer expert discovered it contained more than 140,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton. They were from multiple domain names: State.gov, Clintonemail.com, ClintonFoundation.org, HillaryClinton.com and Blackberry devices. The agent had what he told the inspector general was an “oh shit moment” — recognizing that he had found evidence important to the most important investigation — and he immediately reported it up the chain.

We already knew that President Barack Obama was emailing her on her unsecure server at Clintonemail.com, and Cheryl Mills had written an email noting how “obvious” it was to anyone that this was not State.gov and therefore unsecure. The president jolly-well knew it was not a secure communication as he used an alias.

This was a gargantuan problem for the FBI and for Mrs. Clinton. Other people knew about it, too.

Indeed, according to the inspector general, 39 high-ranking FBI agents knew of it, along with the New York office and people in the New York U.S. Attorney’s office. The New York FBI informed them all during a secure video-conference on September 28 — chaired by Andrew McCabe.

One agent said the announcement of finding hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop was “like dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting.”

The New York agent Sweeney followed up with two calls to McCabe later that evening — after McCabe did not call him as promised.

So . . . what did McCabe, Comey and Strzok do? They sat on it until police officers in New York and FBI agents in New York threatened to expose them.

By October 28, it was only 11 days before the election. Comey panicked. The jig was up. They had been hiding it for three weeks. Comey’s guilt and concern for his own career caused him to realize he could not keep it quiet any longer.

Everything exploded when Comey wrote a letter to Congress vaguely reporting the discovery of “additional emails that appear to be related to the investigation.” He wrote further, “the FBI cannot assess at this time whether or not the material may be significant.”

Comey’s words to Congress are belied by the inspector general’s report who bought none of their excuses for the multi-week delay in addressing the emails.

On October 30, 2016, The Daily Caller reported that the Department of Justice had not even sought a warrant for review of the 350,000 Clinton emails.

Breitbart reported on November 4, 2016 that the New York Police Department officers who had seen the evidence on Weiner’s laptop had threatened to blow the whistle. Remarkably, the “Justice Department” shut them down by allegedly threatening to indict NYPD officers on the two-year old death of Eric Gardner if the NYPD disclosed it.

In a stunning assertion, Director Comey told the Inspector General he did not know Anthony Weiner was married to Huma Abedin. Perhaps they should have told him it was “Carlos Danger?”

Either Comey was bald-faced lying, which is punishable under 18 U.S.C. §1001, or the level of ignorance and incompetence inherent in that representation alone warranted his termination.

Moreover, if Comey’s claim were true, then Comey, McCabe and Strzok should have flown into action at the mere thought of a perverted stranger in a sexual offense investigation having 350,000 emails of the secretary of state including highly classified information — covering her entire tenure there.

From the FBI’s and DOJ’s “handling” of the “Weiner problem,” there is more than enough evidence to demand immediate production of the Weiner laptop and all emails should be obtained from NSA or otherwise to be given to an independent special prosecutor for a full and thorough investigation.

In addition, all of this raises scores upon scores of additional questions.

Here are just 10 such questions:

1. What are the names of all the people the FBI has identified as having emailed Hillary Clinton on her obvious unsecured server at Clintonemail.com? (We already know Obama emailed her on it under an alias. Which other high-ranking officials also emailed Clinton at her unsecured server? What about Robert Mueller? What about Eric Holder?

2. Did the inspector general ask Lynch about threats to NYPD to prosecute officers if they didn’t back down on exposing the email cover-up? Why not?

3. Did the FBI show Hillary the email by Cheryl Mills stating it was “obvious” Clintonemail.com was not secure?

4. Who are the three — just three — FBI agents who reviewed the Weiner laptop and conducted the miraculous de-duping and review in only a few days of 350,000 emails that covered her entire tenure as Secretary of State?

5. Who in the Department of Justice reviewed the 350,000 Clinton emails on Weiner laptop?

6. Who in Department of Justice talked to the New York office about the Weiner laptop?

7. How many classified, top-secret and even more secret chains were found from Clinton’s own production on Weiner’s laptop?

8. Who stripped the classified and confidential markings from the documents Mrs. Clinton received before sending them to her?

9. Where is Weiner’s laptop right now?

10. Who made that phone call from the Department of Justice to the New York Police Department? Exactly what was said?

The Justice Department inspector general report released Friday revealed more personal messages between FBI agents working on the Clinton email probe that suggest a cooked outcome.

The report released new messages from an FBI agent who was one of four case officers handling the “day-to-day” activities of the investigation, and one of two FBI agents who interviewed Clinton.

In one exchange in February 2016, the FBI agent, identified only as “Agent 1,” talked to another FBI employee about interviewing Hillary Clinton’s personal IT staffer. The FBI employee asked how the interview went.

Agent 1 replied: “Awesome. Lied his ass off.”

He continued: “Went from never inside the scif [sensitive compartmented information facility] at [Clinton’s residence], to looked in when it was being constructed, to remove the trash twice, to troubleshot the secure fax with HRC a couple times, to everytime there was a secure fax i did it with HRC. Ridic,”

Lying to investigators is a federal crime, one that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is being charged with, as well as former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. However, the FBI employee joked it “would be funny” if the guy was charged.

The FBI employee replied: “would be funny if he was the only guy charged n this deal.”

Agent 1 responded that even though he lied, “aint noone gonna do s–t.”

He wrote: “I know. For 1001. Even if he said the truth and didnt have a clearance when handling the secure fax — aint noone gonna do s–t”

The report revealed other exchanges that revealed Agent 1’s belief that the outcome of the probe was cooked, in text messages he sent to a fellow FBI agent on the case with whom he was also involved in a relationship.

He advocated against even interviewing Clinton. “We have nothing—shouldn’t even be interviewing”

He also messaged: “My god … I’m actually starting to have embarrassment sprinkled on my disappointment. … Ever been forced to do something you adamantly opposed.”

In a later message, he wrote: “done interviewing the president” in reference to Clinton.

Agent 5 sent a message to him on February 9, 2016, complaining about the investigative work she was being given. He wrote her back:

“Yeah, I hear you. You guys have a shitty task, in a shitty environment. To look for something conjured in a place where you cant find it, for a case that doesnt matter and is predestined.”

On election day, he sent her, “You should know; … that I’m … with her.”

He also called the investigation “the most meaningless thing I’ve ever done,” a “continued waste of resources and time and focus.”

“Its just so obvious how pointless this exercise is …” he wrote.

He later told inspector general investigators that he was “embarrassed” his messages were read and denied it affected his actions in the investigation.

“You know, guys, I just, I think this was primarily used as a personal conversation venting mode for me. I’m embarrassed for it,” he said.

Sources tell The Daily Caller disgruntled FBI agents are too afraid of retaliation to speak out about the Bureau’s many troubles.

The sources say agents don’t trust Congress to protect them from the consequences of testifying and claim whistleblower protection laws are ineffective.

The FBI rarely punishes those who retaliate against whistleblowers, according to the agency itself.

Even as a new Rasmussen poll shows a majority of voters believe senior law enforcement officials broke the law to stop Donald Trump from beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, rank-and-file FBI agents who want to testify against their superiors to Congress feel they can’t due to an ineffective whistleblower protection law.

These agents believe the sluggishness of the law exposes them to an inordinate risk of reprisal, so they have remained in hiding and afraid to speak the truth.

Hillary Should Be Serving A Life Sentence.

This story is based on interview transcripts with two FBI agents that one former White House official provided The Daily Caller. A third special agent also reached out to The Daily Caller to provide information about the current state of the Bureau

The former White House official who maintained direct contact with at least two agents told TheDC they are “hunkering down because they see good people being thrown to the dogs for speaking out and speaking out does nothing to solve the problems.” He believes that “Congress and DOJ are so weak and clueless and can’t be trusted to follow through.”

According to transcripts he shared with TheDC, one special agent said, “It’s a question of basic credibility — Congress, the executive, and oversight are not seen to have any gravitas or seriousness. The inmates have been running the asylum and they don’t respect, much less fear, their overseers. We know we’ll be hung out to dry.”

The agent added, “And don’t get me wrong, there are still a few good people scattered about, but main Justice and the bureaucrats are running the show, want to run out the clock on this administration, and keep the status quo.”

Another special agent, when asked about being subpoenaed, said, “This is a great opportunity for senior or [soon to be retiring] guys, not for someone like me. It’d be suicide. I hate to say it, but neither the judiciary nor the executive branch is wielding any kind of effective oversight right now, and the top managers know it.”

He continued, “You still have a ton of bad people in place. Unless that changes, and I haven’t seen any degree of seriousness on the part of ranking members nor staffers, I’m not meeting with anyone nor willing to be subpoenaed. I’m not coming forward until they get their act together. Right now, it’d be sacrificing a career for cheap political points.”

TheDC has learned that the bureau has already warned agents that the agency will come back viciously against all those “behind destroying their narrative, and will go after their families and friends, too.”

“I’ve worked hard to strengthen legal protections, especially for FBI employees. You have a right to cooperate with Congressional inquiries, just as you have a right to cooperate with the Inspector General. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.”

Sen. Grassley’s law does an appropriate job at protecting whistleblowers from unfair prosecution, but it is not prosecution that prevents agents from stepping forward—it is the possibility of going bankrupt from attorneys’ fees when defending themselves against retaliatory legal actions by their agency.

For example, an FBI agent who came forward as a government whistleblower in 2013 told TheDC he experienced “personal humiliation, stress-related illnesses, and a huge financial loss, requiring my wife (who had undergone two cancer surgeries) to go to work so we could make ends meet.”

However, despite the whistleblower protection law, it seems the agency’s retaliation will likely not be investigated as the process is, as one agent put it to TheDC over email, “slow by design and at the end of the process they will never be held accountable.”

That agent went on to say, “Even with the enactment of the new law, what is the deterrent for retaliation against Whistleblowers? The FBI executives will just stall, ignore, and run out the clock until the victim runs out of money for legal fees or else retires.”

He added, “That is why the new Whistleblowers want to be subpoenaed. They simply don’t have the resources to fight the inevitable retaliation that will ensue, regardless of the new law.”

According to a December 1, 2015 letter from then-FBI Assistant Director Stephen Kelly, less than 2 percent of FBI retaliation claims result in punishment for the retaliators or a remedy for the victims.

“They leave you penniless, unemployed, and unemployable. Those who work those issues in the government who are aware of the score recognize the roadkill they will become if they come forward,” one former Department of Defense official told TheDC.

For months and months, our fake news media have been freaking out over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again and again, we have been told that this is the smoking gun of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Of course, that is nonsense. Moreover, Don Jr. and the others in attendance caught on to the scheme within a few minutes, and as far as we now know, that was the end of that.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others, who actually have colluded with the Russians as a means to dig up dirt on Trump.

Here are seven American politicians and institutions who have or are at least suspected of colluding with the Russians as a means to destroy President Trump.

The CIA

This former CIA Director lied under oath about unmasking.

Although the far-left New York Times is desperately hoping to control the explosion of this bombshell by shrouding it in a laughable story about the CIA trying to retrieve stolen National Security Agency cyber-weapons, the anti-Trump outlet is still forced to report that after “months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.”

And that $100,000 was only supposed to be the first down payment towards a cool million.

The CIA was hoping for images of Trump urinating on hookers in Moscow hotel rooms. All they got was a 15-second clip of some guy in a hotel room talking to some women.

The payoff happened in September of last year.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)

Tell me that this pervert and liar should not be investigated.

In early 2017, Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (so you would think he would know better), thought he was colluding with Ukrainian officials to get compromising materials against Trump. The Ukrainian officials ended up being Russian pranksters. The best you can say about Schiff is that he colluded with Russians to make a horse’s ass of himself.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

The horse man was working with the Russians to bring Trump down. Look at those damn horse teeth.

In March of last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, colluded with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to dig up dirt on Trump.

Naturally, because he has no spine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately ran to Warner’s defense. “Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago,” the jellyfish tweeted. There is just one problem… If you look at the timeline, that “full disclosure” came a full seven months after the collusion occurred.

Rubio fired off another non-sequitur in Warner’s defense. “Has had zero impact on our work,” Rubio wrote, as though that means anything when it comes to the fact that Warner colluded with Russians to harm a sitting president and hid that information from the committee for more than a half-year.

Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele

Steele is the former British spy hired by the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put together the phony Russian dossier that even disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey declared “salacious and unverified.”

To compile these lies, Steele reportedly worked directly with Kremlin officials:

How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.

In other words, Steele and Fusion GPS colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump. Steele then leaked those lies to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Fusion GPS also “spearheaded the campaign to undo the Magnitsky Act, American legislation imposing sanctions on Russian officials and other figures close to Vladimir Putin. Their work featured a smear campaign against the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, financier William Browder.”

If successful, this Fusion GPS campaign would have been of great benefit to the Russian government and countless oligarchs who want the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions lifted.

The Hillary Clinton Campaign

This woman should me handed after being shot.

Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the Clinton campaign’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The Democrat National Committee (DNC)

Why is Little Debbie and Simpson not been indicted?

The DNC hired the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the DNC’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI

You can trust the honest sex symbol James Comey right?

Our own FBI not only put Steele on the payroll, a guy who colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump, the FBI used lies and the dossier — including Kremlin lies — to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.

DOJ’s Rosenstein OK’d Surveillance of Ex-Trump Adviser

This corrupt looking child molester.

A controversial and classified memo shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein okayed an application shortly after taking office last year to monitor a former Trump campaign associate, according to a report.

The Department of Justice under President Trump extended surveillance on Carter Page, believing that he was acting as a Russian agent, the New York Times reported late Sunday, citing people familiar with the memo’s contents.

The document faulted the FBI and the DOJ for failing to completely explain to the intelligence court judge in seeking the warrant that they were relying on information supplied by Christopher Steele, who compiled the disputed dossier that contains unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, the newspaper said.

Research for the dossier had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

A number of top DOJ officials can approve such surveillance but the responsibility usually falls to the deputy attorney general, the newspaper said.

The report also said the FBI and the DOJ did nothing improper in seeking the surveillance warrant against Page, who was part of the campaign until September 2016.

A White House spokesman said Trump wants “transparency throughout this process.”

“Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton,” Hogan Gidley told the Times.

“While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”

The FBI had been keeping an eye on Page for years and an investigation in 2013 showed that a Russian spy tried to recruit him.

But a visit to Russia in July 2016 when he was working with the Trump campaign renewed the bureau’s interest and they began monitoring him again that fall, the Times said.

That surveillance led the FBI and DOJ to seek to renew the application in the spring of 2017, shortly after Rosenstein was confirmed in April, the newspaper said.

Trump has had Rosenstein in his crosshairs, venting to staff his frustration with the DOJ’s No. 2 and mulling whether he should fire him, according to reports.

Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in May 2017 after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been heading up the probe.

Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, the Times reported last Friday.

The White House and some Republican lawmakers are calling for the memo to be declassified and released to the public to show how the agencies are biased against the president.

But Democrats who have seen the four-page memo — written by House Republicans — say they carefully selected information that is intended to discredit the investigation into Russian involvement in the election and any collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.

The DOJ called efforts to release the memo “reckless” without the department and the FBI first being able to review the document to see if it harms national security.

The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon triggered the research into then-candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS that eventually led to the now-infamous Trump “dossier,” the publication’s editor-in-chief and chairman acknowledged in a statement Friday night.

The research effort was known to have been supported by Republican allies before the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign picked up the tab for the research, but the original funder of the research was unknown until now. The resulting dossier was compiled by former British spy Michael Steele and contained unsubstantiated allegations about then-candidate Trump’s connections to Russia. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.

The Free Beacon’s connection to the dossier was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York Friday night.

The site began as a non-profit entity before becoming a for-profit enterprise several years ago. It has never disclosed its owners or financial backers, but the New York Times reports hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer provides a large amount of its funding. The site covers national security issues, politics, culture and media criticism, among other topics.

The Free Beacon says Steele was not involved in the research at the time of its involvement, and “none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.” The Free Beacon also said it had no knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the DNC or Clinton campaign. The Free Beacon has retained third-party firms since its launch in 2012, the statement says.

In the statement, editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said that the publication retained Fusion GPS “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” The statement said representatives of his publication approached the House Intelligence Committee Friday and offered to answer questions.

“But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods,” Continetti and Goldfarb wrote.

Here is the full statement from the Free Beacon:

Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.

Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier. But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods. We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce. The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in news-gathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.

CNN Lied About WikiLeaks Email Story

Donald Trump, in his first tweet on Saturday, said: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump on Saturday fired more shots in his offensive against CNN, after the network was forced to correct an exclusive report that had seemed to implicate his administration in a scandal involving the release of leaked documents.

“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday,” the president tweeted. “They were caught red handed.”

He added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”

The CNN report said Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, received an email offering him access to hacked Democratic party emails from WikiLeaks before the documents had been made publicly available.

But in fact, the email was sent on 14 September 2016, after the material was made publicly available – and not 4 September as CNN first reported.

In a statement, CNN said its “initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email.”

It was the second major correction in a CNN story involving Trump and Russia. Russia is believed to have been behind the original hacking of the documents.

In June, three CNN journalists resigned after the network retracted a report on alleged ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted then. The network said the three journalists who reported that story failed to follow editorial procedures.

In his first tweet on Saturday, Trump added: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”

CNN said it would not fire the reportersbehind the Friday story, as editorial procedures had been followed.

The president also attacked “fake news” on Friday night in Florida, at a rally endorsing Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. In particular, Trump zeroed in on an error made last week by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, over the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.

ABC suspended Ross but did not fire him. The president suggested that attendees at his rally should sue the news outlet for the stock market losses that resulted from the original story.

“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”

Trump also said CNN had “apologised” for its corrected story. It has not.

Also on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used Twitter to highlight CNN’s use of a picture of the wrong Raj Shah in a report on her deputy. “CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews,” she wrote.

Donald Jr added his thoughts in a tweet Saturday morning, writing: “Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.”

There is no evidence that reporting errors and corrections have become any more frequent during the Trump presidency. Trump’s embrace of the concept of “fake news”, though, has allowed him to make substantial political hay from every corrected story.

According to an October Politico poll, 46% of Americans said they believed the media was guilty of wholesale fabrications about the Trump administration. More than three-quarters of Republican voters thought so.

David Frum, a former George W Bush speech writer who is now senior editor at the Atlantic, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He addressed the issue on Saturday morning on Twitter.

While reporters “slip in their work”, Frum wrote, “the work itself is trying to inform the public about the doings of the most systematical untruthful administration in American history”.

Frum continued: “Never forget, though, that the media are not the protagonist in the drama. The protagonists are the officials engaged in the deception, headed by the president himself.”

SAMANTHA POWER UNMASKING 260 People In 2016

While the media rushes frantically from one manufactured Trump scandal to another, the examination of the deeply troubling lenghts to which Obama Inc. went to sabotage his political opponent and successor using eavesdropping continues. One of the most striking revelations has been the number of ‘unmasking’ requests filed by Samantha Power.

Not only did Power file a whole lot of them, 260 requests to unmask the identities of Americans being spied on is a whole lot, but why would an ambassador to the UN even need such classified info?

And to that, Samantha Power had a simple and incoherent response. “It wasn’t me.”

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was “emphatic” on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.

Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests — a rate of one per business day — in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama’s term.

Unmasking has become an issue because someone inside the Obama administration unmasked the identities of Trump associates identified in classified intelligence reports collected by the intelligence community during surveillance of foreign targets. Some of those details were illegally leaked to the media.

Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence committee, said that Power “was pretty emphatic” last week in disputing that she made 260 unmasking requests.

“She would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy told Fox’s Bret Baier.

“Her perspective, her testimony is, ‘they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”

It’s a really bizarre defense that relies on either challenging the relevant paperwork or suggesting that someone else using her name made those requests. The latter defense is rather crazy. If true, it would constitute a major crime. If untrue, then Power has hung herself. Susan Rice repeatedly lied about her unmasking requests, but what Power is doing here is Hillaryesque. And we know how that worked out for her.

The Obama administration knew that Russia had used bribery, kickbacks and extortion to get a stake in the US atomic energy industry — but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the US uranium supply anyway, according to a report Tuesday.

The FBI used a confidential US witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings and intercept ­emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company, The Hill reported.

Executives at the company, Transport Logistics International, kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts — a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the report said.

The feds also learned that Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the US designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering operation was conducted “with the consent of higher-level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, an agent later stated in an affidavit.

But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.

At the time, President Barack Obama and Clinton’s State Department were trying to “reset” relations between the two nuclear rivals — an effort that largely failed.

The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010 when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and elsewhere, to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.

The move gave the Russians control over roughly 20 percent of the US uranium supply — and gave Russian strongman Vladimir Putin a large and profitable stake in the US atomic power industry.

When Donald Trump slammed Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 over the sale, her spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and that the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened . . . on any [committee] matter.”

In the second deal, in 2011, Obama gave the OK for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell the Canadian company’s uranium to American nuclear power plants.

Before, Tenex could only sell reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons to power plants in the US.

“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a source told the paper.

Instead of disclosing the racket in 2010, Justice continued investigating for nearly four more years, so Americans and Congress didn’t know about Russian nuclear corruption at the time the deals were completed.

Obama and the Clintons defended their actions in 2015, declaring that there was no evidence that Russians had done anything wrong and there was no national security reason to oppose the Uranium One deal.

The decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015, when author Peter Schweizer documented how Bill Clinton pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian entities.

But FBI, Energy Department and court documents showed that the feds had gathered a mountain of evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the top Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the US — was engaged in crooked behavior starting in 2009.

Holder was also on the foreign investments committee at the time the Uranium One deal was approved — but multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever told other committee members about the crimes they had uncovered.

Evidence of the illegal conduct was gathered with the help of an American businessman who acted as a confidential witness and who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI.

The first kickback recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.

In affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to help the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money-laundering and kickbacks that were directed by Russia and provided kickbacks to top Russian energy officials with ties to the Kremlin, according to the report.

The case exposed a serious national security breach, The Hill reported, as Mikerin had given a no-bid contract to Transport Logistics Intern

The author who wrote Clinton Cash and sparked an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation is preparing to launch his highly anticipated investigative follow-up—a book that appears it will be every bit as explosive as his last.

On Monday, publishing giant Harper Collins released the book cover of Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends. While little is known about the book’s contents, five images on the book’s cover suggest that Schweizer’s next targets may include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Vice President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

According to the publisher, Secret Empires will expose vast corruption by top Washington figures who leverage their political power to enrich their family members and friends, often by helping grease deals with foreign entities.

The author of four major New York Times bestsellers, Schweizer has garnered praise from conservatives and progressives alike for his reputation as a nonpartisan deep-dive investigative journalist. Newsweek dubbed him “the wonk who slays Washington.” Indeed, among Washington insiders, the launch of a Schweizer book is regarded as somewhat of an event—one that has resulted in ethics probes, the passage of major anti-corruption legislation, members of Congress stepping down, and, in the case of the Clintons, an FBI investigation.

In 2012, 60 Minutes based a feature report on Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out that exposed congressional insider trading by members of Congress. The 60 Minutes report won the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based journalism. After Schweizer’s revelations, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill called the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) to ban lawmakers from using insider knowledge to make personal stock trades. As left-leaning Slate noted, Schweizer wrote “the book that started the STOCK Act stampede.” One of the main targets of the book, the powerful chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Spencer Bachus (R-AL), announced he would not seek reelection following the book’s revelations.

In 2013, Schweizer released Extortion:How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets and sparked the resignation of Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ). Schweizer revealed that Andrews used $16,575 from his leadership PAC to jet he and his family to a lavish resort in Edinburgh, Scotland. CBS’s 60 Minutes partnered with Schweizer again to report Extortion’s findings. Following Rep. Andrews’s resignation, Schweizer said: “The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) is a nonpartisan investigative research team committed to exposing cronyism and misuse of taxpayer money. For those discouraged by the cronyism corrupting Washington, the Andrews resignation demonstrates that we can hold them accountable. For those in power who are engaging in self-enrichment, we have two words: watch out.”

Then in 2015, Schweizer sent shockwaves through Washington, DC, with the release of Clinton Cash. The book revealed that Hillary Clinton’s State Department, along with eight other agencies, approved the transfer of 20 percent of U.S. uranium and that nine foreign investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times ran a 4,000-word front-page story based on the book and confirmed its findings, as did the Washington Post and several others. Hillary Clinton’s campaign kicked into overdrive trying to refute the book’s myriad revelations. Surprisingly, some of Schweizer’s strongest defenders came from the political left. Progressive columnist Eleanor Clift hailed Schweizer “an equal-opportunity investigator, snaring Republicans as well as Democrats.” And Columbia University Earth Institute Director Jeffrey D. Sachs said Clinton Cash was “compelling reading on how Bill and Hillary have mixed personal wealthy, power, and influence peddling.”

A feature-length documentary film based on the book debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and also received wide praise. MSNBC said the film was “devastating” and that it “powerfully connects the dots.”

Later, in November 2016, the New York Times reported that an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation “was based mostly on information that had surfaced in news stories and the book Clinton Cash, according to several law enforcement officials briefed on the case.”

Will Secret Empires result in a similar political firestorm? For now, Schweizer isn’t saying.

“My publisher has me under a strict embargo not to reveal any contents from the book,” Schweizer told Breitbart News.

According to HarperCollins, Secret Empiresis slated to hit bookshelves nationwide March 2oth.